SQUAREWHEELS.org.ukImola 1994

This page describes, in recollections, diary-entries,
newspaper-cuttings, video- and sound-recordings, how the events at Imola
1994 unfolded for one impressionable teenager, and how they affected
him.

I remember Ayrton Senna, and
it seems terrible to have to use those words…— Murray Walker,
1 May 1994

Ayrton Senna was the most dedicated racing-driver I
have ever met … He lived to drive. And he died driving.—
Jackie Stewart, May 1994

One of the bleakest weekends that world motorsport
has ever seen: a catalogue of tragedy and disaster.— Steve
Rider, 1 May 1994 before Senna’s death was announced

I have absolutely no desire to get into a racing car.
We were supposed to test yesterday for Monaco, but I didn’t want to do
it. I don’t think that I’m ready yet … I’ve always raced with my heart.
I’ve lived for it my whole life, but if my feelings tell me I’m unable to
take the risks any more, I’ll quit.— Gerhard Berger, 8 May
1994

This page was written in late April 2014, and
last modified on 28 August 2015

Background

I was at boarding-school in 1994, studying for my A-levels. It was
the second year that I had properly followed Formula One motor racing, or
F1, and the unknowns presented by Ayrton Senna’s move to the
championship-winning Williams team were tremendously exciting. Ayrton
was the only F1 World Champion in the whole field, and was partnered with
Damon Hill who had proved his speed and talent against Alain Prost in
1993.

As everyone knows, things hadn’t gone very well in the Williams
camp in those first two races of the season, with Ayrton failing to
finish either race. Michael Schumacher seemed to be going better than
ever in the Benetton (as I had predicted!) but Ayrton and others
suspected he and his team were cheating.

Paradoxically, perhaps, I sometimes had more opportunity to keep up
with all things F1 when at school rather than during the holidays,
because at home we had no TV nor any newspapers (my godmother’s house and
TV was much visited, however!). I’d followed the Brazillian GP of 27
March, listening to BBC Radio 5 in its final hours before “5 Live” was
launched, via a walkman whilst on the train home from a day out at the
Science Museum; the Pacific GP from Aida I’d watched on RTL in the middle
of the night at a German scientific-research outpost on a mountain-top in
Spain, waking in front of the TV to the strains of the German national
anthem which immediately told me that Schumacher had won again.

At school there was access to both TV and newspapers, though getting
to watch a Grand Prix or its highlights on a communal TV was often
fraught by other boys who wished to watch other programmes. I habitually
leafed through the communal newspapers (Times, Independent, I think the
Telegraph and the Guardian, sometimes a tabloid) in the library in search
of F1-related news; late at night at the end of a day I would retrieve
articles of interest and cut them out with my penknife-scissors! Hence
my collection of which the items shared on this page are a part.

Now we came to the third race of the season, held at Imola in northern
Italy but titled as the San Marino Grand Prix on behalf of the nearby
principality.

Practice and qualifying were not normally shown on BBC TV, though I
did sometimes have access to Eurosport; usually I waited to see what the
papers had to say, or fetched provisional qualifying times down from
Ceefax via a terminal in the Science department.

Note: copyright of the original newspapers and TV/radio
broadcasts, from which derivatives featured throughout this page have
been produced, rests with their originators.

Saturday 30 April 1994

So, it was only when reading the newspapers on Saturday morning, 30
April 1994, that I saw that Rubens Barrichello had had a big crash:

As we would discover only too soon this sort of smug, congratulatory
headline would never be written again: the miracles ran out after this
crash. Only when I found this other view of it was it really apparent
quite how much energy must have been dissipated in the crash:

In The Times (alongside), the 21-year-old Barrichello is quoted as
being sufficiently OK following his crash that he jokes to reporters that
I’m off to play with the nurses now.

The photo shows Senna discussing steering-wheels with his
race-engineer David Brown, which may well be related to the discomfort
that Ayrton was encountering in the cockpit and which triggered the
modification to the steering-column which many suspect of causing his
fatal crash.

Senna remarks of Imola that There are no small accidents here,
which even the columnist Oliver Holt recognised as having sufficient
potential for omen that he placed it as the closing words of the article.
Neither Holt nor Senna could ever have guessed at the hideous realisation
of that portent that would play out over the next couple of days.

During the course of Saturday morning I paid a visit
to my usual haunt at school, Mill—where I could usually bank on
borrowing the use of a video-recorder—and set it to record the
entire Grand Prix programme the following day.

It was the first weekend of the summer term. Eager to make the most
of the longer days, that afternoon I’d taken a packed lunch and
gone on a 3-hour bike-ride, the last ride of significance on my old,
nth-hand five-speed bike as my new touring-bike was about to be
delivered (I would ride across France on it that summer): fittingly, I
even equalled my then fastest-ever top speed, 42.9 miles per
hour. I enjoyed the springtime air and the Hampshire sunshine, savoured
the views from Lane End Down on that clear day, and treated myself to an
ice cream when I got back.

In the evening I had been glad to get up to date with various bits of
paperwork and even had written my diary, and went to bed at 2350hrs. I
recall drifting off to sleep in my bedsit with, as usual, Radio 4 playing
into my ear with a Sleep-timer set: it would have been the midnight
news.

Suddenly from the first descent into sleep I was woken with a jolt by
the realisation of what the midnight news was telling me: that a Formula
1 driver had been killed during qualifying. My nocturnal confusion was
furthered by the fact it was a name I did not recognise at all, an
Austrian whose name would become widely known almost exclusively,
tragically, as a result of his death: Roland Ratzenberger.

Sunday 1 May 1994

Upon waking, quite uncharacteristically I was immediately up, dressed
and heading downstairs towards the house library with a distinctly uneasy
feeling in the pit of my stomach: I had to know the details of
the tragedy whose outline I’d half-heard in the dark last night.
Before I could even get there I bumped into Alex, with whom I shared an
interest in F1 and who had also heard that a hitherto-unknown driver had
died at Imola. He lamented, What is happening?.

The newspaper-headline in the Guardian, coupled with a view of the
unsupported helmet of a driver in his destroyed car, made the answer
abundantly clear:

Nigel Roebuck was a writer whose name I associated with the
fortnightly race-reports in Autosport magazine (of which more later). In
this article he writes sensitively and without sensationalism. Perhaps
surprisingly, a quote seems to indicate that Flavio Briatore was putting
principles before performance.

The photo accompanying the following article in the Independent is
even more shocking: not only is the monocoque survival-cell
breached—you can see Roland’s left elbow and knee—but
the poor man’s blood is evident above his visor:

David Tremayne is surely correct in his article above, in stating that
the result of the San Marino Grand Prix will inevitably be tainted by
Ratzenberger’s fatal crash; it is one of the saddest twists of fate
that the 1994 San Marino GP would be tainted by an even greater tragedy
which all too often tends to eclipse the proper remembrance of
Roland.

Race

After chapel I and a few others, including I think Jamie who had
introduced me to motor-racing and was visiting, gathered in Alex’s
bedsit to watch the race on his clandestinely-owned colour TV. I
don’t much recall what we saw at the time, but have since seen many
times the programme recorded on my videotape in Mill.

Sunday Grandstand was hosted by Sue Barker who was very new at the
BBC; for the first time, the BBC had its own broadcast-facilities at a
Grand Prix (other than at Silverstone, presumably) and so Steve Rider
introduced the Grand Prix programme live from Imola. The pre-race
coverage is already to be found on YouTube. There was some slightly sombre,
downbeat introduction to camera and a brief interview with Jonathan
Palmer; but from then on it was firmly talk of normal things, racing
matters—as if F1 would just take Ratzenberger’s death in its
stride and the show would go on.

The show would have other ideas, of course.

On the video are interviews with Schumacher and Senna, videotaped ones
from Thursday or Friday which were spliced together so that segments from
each are interwoven. Senna presents a philosophical outlook, stating
that Basically our championship starts here: fourteen races, not
sixteen, and Murray Walker enquires by way of a statement,

Now you’ve won here three times already,
you really do need to make it four?

Senna’s response, I would love to, and the look in his
eyes at that point, would still have the power to haunt me months
later.

Just before the race started, it was 1pm local time in the UK and so
time for house lunch—a semi-formal ritual even on Sundays which
could not be missed on an ad-hoc basis. (Subsequently I would sneakily
order myself a packed lunch and so be legitimately absent, on purpose to
go and watch such 1pm-start Grands Prix uninterrupted!)

And so it was nearly twenty to two when we ran upstairs back to
Alex’s bedsit to watch the race which must by then be some 15 to 20
laps old. Except it wasn’t: there was no racing taking place at
all, but we were watching a replay from on board Schumacher’s car,
the footage was rolling slowly forwards and backwards in the Tamburello,
although exactly why was unclear.

Only by gradual revelation of the context did it become apparent to us
that it was a crash by Senna’s car which had stopped the race; he
had already been removed by helicopter just as we ran upstairs, the grid
was now re-forming, and so we did not fully comprehend the gravity of
what had taken place.

Thus I had no reason to fear that Senna was seriously or critically
injured. Indeed I remember thinking, not only was it most unlike Senna
to have had a serious ‘off’, but the instinctive, automatic thought that
it’s Senna, so of course he’s all right.

Only on replaying the video many years later with rather greater
knowledge, and seeing the segment we missed during lunch, would it be
apparent that more than one of the doctors carrying or accompanying
Ayrton to the helicopter visibly have red on their knees from where they
knelt in the pool of his blood (see white-helmeted man in screenshot
below).

The BBC’s own broadcast-unit was on the pitwall at this time,
producing local images of the pitlane. Johnny Herbert was standing
beneath a Lotus umbrella on the pitwall and winces as he sees the
wreckage of the Williams-Renault being brought back past on its way to a
secure garage.

For some reason, after the race had restarted I decided to rush over
to Mill, expecting to watch the end of the race there. To my surprise
the classroom area there was full of pupils: Andy, the head of
department, was supervising detention there instead of in the usual
location. Worse, I could see through the window in the door that the
video-machine had been switched off at the wall; it transpired Andy had
done this, unaware that it was set to record, at about 1345. My
recording therefore cuts back in at around lap 39.

By chance, as soon as the recording resumes, we hear the voice of
Steve Rider with a medical update which concludes with news of Senna,
saying simply:

Ayrton Senna’s condition (is) extremely grave.

Murray Walker’s commentary is entirely devoid of its usual zest
and firey delivery:

And with about 19 laps to go now the San Marino comes to a close,
which I’m sorry to say everybody will be very glad to see. It has been a
most unhappy meeting in so many ways…

His commentary, most uncharacteristically, becomes even flatter and
more punctuated by sighing and a downbeat feeling of hopelessness once
Michele Alboreto loses a wheel whilst driving out of the pits, injuring
four mechanics:

Now this is the last thing the San Marino Grand Prix
needs… I’m guessing, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all in view of the
way this race has gone and the chaos in the pit lane, and the fact that
there’s a stretcher there, to see the race stopped. It’s run the
mandatory distance of three-quarters in order to enable full World
Championship points to be awarded, although that is a bit
irrelevant now too. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the red
flags come out to stop one of the most unhappy races it has been my ill
fortune to watch in my entire Grand Prix viewing career.

There was a little light relief near the end when the veteran Italian
driver Andrea de Cesaris dropped his Jordan harmlessly into the wall,
causing Jonathan Palmer to say in his commentary,

Interestingly, de Cesaris is the most experienced driver in Grand
Prix, although you wouldn’t believe it looking at that: he’s
finished—or certainly started—190 Grands Prix in his
career.

(Michele Alboreto and Andrea de Cesaris have each since lost their
lives in accidents.)

As Schumacher comes up to the finish-line, the commentary-team gave
their summaries:

Jonathan Palmer: It’s not been anything other than a dreadful
weekend for everybody involved, and it’s going to be a major black
mark on Formula 1, or certainly in the history-books, for a long
time.

Murray Walker: Michael Schumacher comes down
to the Rivazza for the fifty-eighth time, and he’s nearly a minute
now ahead of the second-placed man, as he comes home certainly to win,
commandingly—and with a great deal of credit in very difficult
circumstances—his third successive Grand Prix. He exits the
Traguardo, and the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix has been won by Michael
Schumacher, but in circumstances that I am sure he will not be at all
happy about—and that is no reflection on him, his ability or his
car.

Well, there’s no point in trying to pretend that it has been
anything other than a very, very unhappy San Marino Grand Prix
weekend.

Summing-up the race

The coverage of the Grand Prix ended with Steve Rider making a short
summary to camera from the pitwall:

And that’s the 1994 San Marino Grand
Prix. The history-books will show that victory for Michael Schumacher,
but it will also record one of the bleakest weekends that world
motorsport has ever seen: a catalogue of tragedy and disaster. We had
the death of the Austrian Roland Ratzenberger yesterday; the afternoon
here began with a start-line accident, a tyre into the crowd, although
the injuries there we understand were slight; we’ve had a rogue
tyre down the pitlane, we don’t yet know the extent of the injuries
there.

But we’ve also got Ayrton Senna, one
of the greatest talents that Formula 1 has ever seen, currently lying in
a Bologna hospital, in a coma with what’s reported to be grave
head-injuries.

As you can imagine, nobody wants to volunteer an opinion or an
emotion down the pitlane here until the time is absolutely right; and the
time certainly isn’t right now, we’re not going to push them
into that. Suffice to say that when it is appropriate, we’ll have
further details from Imola before the end of the of the programme. Now
back to London.

In a coma with grave head-injuries, he said.

Even then it didn’t sink in: not really. I subsequently went
back to Mill, and I remember speaking in anguished tones with Gerald
Penney who took an interest in F1; I wondered aloud to him whether Senna
would miss some races, whether he’d race again this year. I got
Gerald to record the BBC highlights (see below) on his video-recorder, in
case my attempts to record it in Mill got thwarted by Andy again.

Sunday evening

Through the late afternoon and into the evening, I was back in my
bedsit listening to the radio, and becoming more agitated. The
news-reports on 5 Live seemed to imply that Senna was critically injured.
Eventually they announced that he was ‘clinically dead’: did that mean he
was really dead, or not? Could he still be saved? (Many years later I
would understand that it referred to the situation as described shortly,
in which he was brain-dead but that his circulation was being maintained
by a machine.)

[Brian Perkins] The three-times Formula One World Champion Ayrton
Senna has been pronounced clinically dead after crashing into a concrete
wall during the San Marino Grand Prix. The 34-year-old Brazillian was
leading when his Williams-Renault left the track. Simon Taylor was
commentating for BBC television.

[Simon Taylor, excerpt from live radio-commentary] Well they come past
us once again to complete the sixth lap in a great blast of sound, and
the gap sixty-eight hundredths of a second, so Senna has gained perhaps
just a tenth of a second and Senna’s off! Is that Senna off…
Ayrton Senna has had a big accident, the car has crashed on the outside
of the circuit going down to Villeneuve, there is wreckage all over the
road, the Villeneuve corner, and Senna still inside that car as the
marshals run towards it, the right wheels both of them torn off the
car…

[Brian Perkins] Senna was airlifted to a hospital in Bologna in a deep
coma. Doctors said they decided not to operate because his head-injuries
were too serious. They said he was being kept alive on a life-support
system because of Italian law. We’ve just had this report from
Simon Taylor:

[Simon Taylor] Senna was leading the race when his Williams-Renault
failed to take a flat-out left-hand curve and slammed into the
retaining-wall at about a hundred-and-sixty-five miles an hour. Two
wheels were torn off, and debris flew across the track into the path of
the following cars. The race was stopped, and Senna was released from
the wreckage by the circuit doctors, who gave him emergency medical
attention at the trackside, before he was taken by helicopter to hospital
in Bologna. In the last hour, a statement from the hospital has
pronounced Senna clinically dead. Senna’s accident follows the crash in
qualifying yesterday which cost the life of the Austrian driver Roland
Ratzenberger. The race was eventually restarted, and Michael Schumacher
scored an unchallenged victory for Benetton with Nicola Larini’s Ferrari
second from Mika Häkkinen’s McLaren.

Perkins, whose style of newsreading has always been to my liking,
emphasised the d-consonants on “dead” to make it perfectly clear to
listeners that they had not mis-heard him. His script, however, was
mistaken about Simon Taylor’s commentating as it was for BBC Radio Five
Live, not BBC television: in any case it is obvious from hearing Simon’s
first clip that it is a radio commentary.

Given that Senna’s actual death was announced at the Maggiore Hospital
by Dr. Fiandri at 1840hrs local time (1740 BST), the use of the term
“clinically dead” was already 20 minutes out-of-date in these reports, as
actual death had already been announced.

As that springtime evening wore on, a couple of other boys came to see
me, knowing that I would be able to provide the answer: one was trying to
tell the other that Senna was dead, but the other simply refused to
believe him. I played the tape and the other—visibly
shocked—willingly handed over a fiver he’d just lost in
betting that it were not true: such was the incomprehensibility of this
awful news.

In a desperate bid to try and make it seem real, I took my
fountain-pen and wrote very neatly the words Ayrton Senna is dead.
on a piece of paper and pinned it to the house notice-board, with four
drawing-pins so that it wouldn’t disappear instantly through people
re-using a pin for their own notice.

And yet it is tremendously well done, in the spirit of all that was
best about the BBC coverage in those days. Although it was
pre-recorded—thanks to the BBC
Genome entry for 1 May 1994 we now know the broadcast was at
2110hrs—from the passage of time on Steve Rider’s wristwatch
and the uninterruptedness of the interviews, it was clearly done in very
few takes.

[BBC announcer] It’s been a tragic weekend for motor racing. Now on
BBC2, instead of the scheduled highlights from the San Marino Grand Prix,
Steve Rider reflects on the great loss felt tonight by the racing world.

[BBC Sport logo animation with sound]

[Steve Rider, live to camera] Good evening, if you’ve tuned in
tonight expecting the outstanding race that the San Marino Grand Prix
here at Imola promised to be, then I’m sorry, that’s not the
programme we have for you. Instead, the sport of Formula 1 tonight is in
deep mourning. Yesterday we had the loss of Roland Ratzenberger, the
first Formula 1 racing fatality for twelve years. And today we’ve
lost arguably the greatest talent of his generation: after a high-speed
crash at Tamburello, Ayrton Senna is dead.

[Vision: illustrative VT sequences] Like Ratzenberger yesterday and
Barrichello on Friday, it was a violent accident and its cause remains a
mystery. There was enormous shock around the circuit, but for a while,
there was hope. Senna was seen to move, he required a great deal of
attention at the crash site, and was then taken by helicopter to Maggiore
hospital in Bologna; and straight into intensive care. And when the
first bulletins were issued, the hope started to fade. Senna had grave
head-injuries, was in a coma, for a while his heart stopped beating; he
was revived, but at six-thirty local time came the news that Senna was
clinically dead. The last hope was gone, a great star was lost.

The San Marino Grand Prix weekend had begun with the dramatic accident
that Rubens Barrichello miraculously survived with only minor injuries.
But the next day the miracles ran out, and Roland Ratzenberger in only
his second Grand Prix became the first race-meeting fatality that Formula
One had suffered in twelve years; the next was tragically barely 24 hours
away. And race-day today had other potential tragedies: at the start
Pedro Lamy in the Lotus failed to avoid a stalled JJ Lehto, a tyre flew
into the crowd injuring eight spectators, none seriously; both drivers
were unhurt. Later in the afternoon a tyre and bodywork flew off Michele
Alboreto’s Minardi as it sped out of the pit lane; four
mechanics—two from Ferrari, two from Lotus—needed hospital
treatment.

[Steve Rider, to camera] So it’s been a dreadful day, and the
loss of Ayrton Senna is really tough to comprehend. He qualified
yesterday with his 65th pole position of his career; if he’d gone
on to take the victory that everyone predicted, it would have been his
42nd in Grand Prix motor racing. He was three times a winner here at San
Marino, he was three times a world champion. Here’s the thoughts
of our commentary team.

Murray Walker, an overwhelming sense of sadness here today; what kind
of talent, what kind of star, has the sport lost today?

[Murray Walker] Well, I can still hardly comprehend that it’s
happened, Steve. I remember Ayrton Senna—and it seems terrible to have
to use those words—as a tremendously intense man who was determined to
achieve his goals; he came here as an unknown Brazillian who couldn’t
speak English, he came to a cold climate, he lived a long way away from
home and he applied himself one thousand per cent to his craft, he
succeeded in all the categories that he was in until he got to Formula
One, he very nearly won a Grand Prix in his first year, he then went on
to become a three-times world champion. And as far as I am concerned—and
I do see all of them—he was a man who was always courteous, always
considerate, always helpful, and he was a man of his word: if you wanted
to talk to him, he would say ‘Yes, come and see me after qualifying’, and
you might have to wait a long time, but you always got him. On top of
that, he was a tremendously successful businessman, he was much loved by
his family and all his friends around him, and it is truly a dreadful
dreadful blow to motor sport.

[Steve Rider] You’ve seen most of the great Grand Prix drivers
there have been; where would you place Ayrton Senna among those?

[Murray Walker] Oh, I would er, unhesitating… unhesitatingly place him
in the top three, I think I would place him with Nuvolari and with Jim
Clark, and I would put Stirling Moss in the same bracket. But you can’t
speak about many drivers in the same breath as you can Ayrton Senna.

[Steve Rider] How does the sport now handle the loss, if it can?
Formula One has… an image problem now?

[Murray Walker] Well (sigh), what I’m going to say, Steve, may sound
callous and I don’t mean it to. But Grand Prix Racing, motor racing, is
an extremely dangerous sport: it always has been, it always will be, it’s
in the nature of the sport. The drivers who take part in it
know that something like this in their heart of hearts
could happen to them; they wouldn’t do it if they knew it
was going to happen to them, but they accept the risks because
the passion is worth the risk, and that’s what they want to do. And I
don’t think anything ought to be done to stop them. It’s happened in the
past: it will happen again. All I can say is that it has happened on
this occasion to a truly great man, and although it’s a cliché he will be
desperately, desperately missed, and Formula One is going to be stunned
for the whole of the rest of this season.

[Steve Rider] Jonathan Palmer, amid all the great sadness, the sport
has to ask itself, ‘Why have there been two fatalities in just two
days?’: there must be a reason.

[Jonathan Palmer] That’s certainly a logical question, but I
can’t help thinking that it is the most tragic of coincidence
overall. I think it’s important to recognise that, from what we
know, neither of these two accidents had anything to do with drivers
wrestling with their cars, trying to over-drive it, and losing control
purely through trying to go quickly. I think in both situations, in both
circumstances, something has broken—possibly with the car, possibly
some debris on the circuit, possibly a tyre—there has been some
outside influence rendering the driver no chance of controlling the
vehicle. And with the very high speeds that we see here at Imola, plus
the fact that those high speeds are seen on swerving parts of the
circuit, the car will almost certainly go off the road and hit the
concrete walls either side.

[Steve Rider] We talked before the race; with the change in
regulations, there are new and greater demands on drivers this year.

[Jonathan Palmer] Yes, there are. We’ve seen the changes in
regulations removing active suspension, which only had one year of
prevalence in Formula One after all, you know, we’ve been using the
sorts of suspension that we have now for decades in the past; so
non-active suspension is not new. And indeed nor is getting rid of
traction control; traction control is undoubtedly an aid to safety, in
the same way that ABS braking is an aid to safety under braking; but of
course it does remove driver influence, and it’s always been very
important to Formula One to have the driver being in as much control of
the car as possible, and his skills influencing the car’s
performance. But again, those kind of changes—particularly
removing traction control—sure’s meant the cars have been
harder to drive, but really at the slower parts of the circuit:
it’s easier to spin the cars. But once again I emphasise that
these two incidents had nothing to do with drivers losing control of
their vehicles while pushing them to the limit. In both circumstances
the cars left the road when they should have been capable of rounding the
corners without any problem whatsoever, well within the limits of both
the drivers and the cars. Something went wrong in both occasions.

[Steve Rider] You raced against Ayrton Senna; what a great talent the
sport has lost today?

[Jonathan Palmer] It’s absolutely devastating, I think everybody is
totally numb about… the thing. To my mind he was the best driver Grand
Prix racing had ever seen. Different people have different views, but I
think the guy was quite exceptional; and it’s a dreadful loss to the
world of motor sport.

[Steve Rider; vision shows static trailer] There’ll be more on a
great racing driver in a special tribute programme at two-twenty on
Wednesday afternoon, BBC2.

[Vision: illustrative VT sequences] We had a race today: (a) two-part
race in which Michael Schumacher made it three wins out of three, for
Benetton. Nicola Larini added some joy to the day with second place for
Ferrari, Häkkinen third for McLaren, with Damon Hill completing the top
six. Schumacher now dominates the world championship, with maximum
points from the first three rounds; the next round in Monaco, in two
weeks time, takes place without one of Monaco’s most famous residents,
Ayrton Senna. As a result, there was no champagne on the podium after
the race this afternoon; there really was nothing to celebrate, even for
Michael Schumacher:

[Michael Schumacher, VT from Unilateral Room post-race
press-conference] Just win a race, but I can’t satisfied,
can’t feel happy. I mean, what happened this weekend, never have
seen something like this, not just one thing, so many things. The only
thing I can say about it is, I hope we learn from this. I think there is
a lot to learn from, and we have to use this; and things like this they
shouldn’t happen without taking the experience from it.
That’s the only thing I want to say and I can say.

[Steve Rider, to camera] I’ve known Ayrton Senna and had the
genuine pleasure of interviewing Ayrton Senna, ever since his early days
in Formula Ford and Formula Three, back in the early eighties. And to my
mind he was one of the most talented, motivated, focussed and lucid
sportsmen that I’ve ever come across. Formula One this evening is
mourning the loss of not one, but two drivers: Roland Ratzenberger, and
Ayrton Senna.

[2 photographs, then static BBC Sport logo without sound]

There are no easy ways to deliver that sort of news, but I’ve
always felt that Steve Rider did an exceptional job that day.

Murray talks plenty of sense; his quote, I remember Ayrton Senna,
and it seems terrible to have to use those words…, complete with
shrug of the shoulders and shake of the head, is really uncomfortable to
watch when you consider just how sudden, raw and shocking it all was on
the day. Even in such a situation there is unconscious wry humour to be
observed, in the timing of a helicopter taking off nearby (the
filming-location appears to have been on the roof of the pits/paddock
complex) which ironically causes Murray to hesistate whilst trying to say
the word ‘unhesitatingly’.

Even Jonathan Palmer, not the best-liked of co-commentators and
criticised by Murray in his autobiography for being too boring and
technical, comes out with reasoned discussion and rational argument in
his answers; he understandably becomes momentarily lost for words because
of the sheer horror of it all and what suitable noun to use, when he says
that Everbody is totally numb about… the thing.

The tribute programme at 2:20 on Wednesday afternoon was in the TV
slot allocated to a replay of the Imola Highlights programme.

In common with other sources from May 1994 (including the
newspaper-reports above), the caption to the final static photos (above)
on this programme indicated that Roland Ratzenberger’s year of
birth was 1962: it was in fact 1960, however Roland liked to make himself appear younger and so
more attractive to racing-teams. The adjacent static photo above appears
to be a frame-grab from the interview Senna gave Murray Walker on
Thursday or Friday (q.v. pre-race VT).

Monday 2 May

My diary simply says, Very difficult to concentrate at all on
anything. Here’s why:

Will Buxton, then a 13-year-old chorister in Worcester, was deeply
affected by Senna’s death. Unlike me, he managed to do
something really constructive with the resulting grief, and ended up as a
motorsport journalist.

Having been one of many, many witnesses to what was probably then the
most public death ever—even though I was having lunch at the time
of Ayrton’s accident itself—I was certainly grieving; and yet
I was grieving for someone who did not know me, for someone whom I had
never met. It was a peculiar situation and one which would have been
very awkward to explain to someone not already similarly
affected—not that I tried.

And so that week at school I was just going through the motions, no
doubt crying betimes; my hapless attempt to be ready for A-levels was
doubtless further hampered over the coming days: not only could I not
concentrate on academia, but such things took on even less significance
in the light of this sudden exposure to tragedy. At that stage in my
life I was too unsure of myself to go and seek help, to talk to anyone
about it; I feared, probably with some justification, ridicule.

Thursday 5 May 1994

Diary: Went to WHSmith and bought Autosport, read it for
ages & ages.

Sunday 8 May 1994

It was only following a visit on this day from my Mother, who
incidentally brought with her that brand-new touring-bike I’d
already chosen a fortnight previously, that I then seemed to re-grasp my
desire for the Here and the Now, I got on with catching up on some
academic work, went out and did some much-needed organ-practice, and
generally recommenced getting on with my own life.

Tuesday 10 May 1994

Friday 13 May 1994: the trouble continues…

On the very next day of F1 racing after Imola, the special Thursday
qualifying-day at Monaco, Karl Wendlinger crashed his Sauber and suffered
severe head-injuries which left him in a coma for some weeks. Karl did
make a recovery sufficient that he drove the Sauber during the 1995
season, but he was less competitive than expected and his F1 career never
reached its anticipated potential.

Onward

It was probably not until some point in the summer holidays when I had
proper access to a TV and VCR, that I thought I had better sit and watch
(such material as I had of) the San Marino GP—as uncomfortable
viewing as I knew it would be.

Even in November 1994 I wrote that the whole business of Senna’s
death still upsets me quite considerably just when I read the
newspaper reports of it or even just see the big poster (photo from
Suzuka 1993 given away with Autosport magazine) on my wall.

Further resources

There’s a great documentary called The Team: A Season With
McLaren made in 1993 and aired on BBC2; I caught just one episode of
it, episode 4 of 7, The Boy from Brazil, air-date
3 December 1993. It features lots of great footage of Senna including
some revealing interviews about his contractual wrangles with Ron Dennis,
about how there’s no point being a nice guy in Formula 1, and about
financial rewards. Highly watchable!

If you’re going to be nice and take it
easy, you might as well do something else, not in Formula 1—stay
home, or have a more ordinary profession.

In the end, you get paid what you’re worth.
You know, if you’re paid one dollar, or a million dollars,
it’s what you can offer back.